Marlene Dumas loves horror, only the terrible is truly beautiful, thinks the South African artist, who creates vague portraits of a cruel world from detailed photographs and disturbs the viewer with abysmal phantasmagoria.
(...) Continue readingMarlene Dumas – Art studies in Cape Town, emigration to The Netherlands
Marlene Dumas was born on 3 August 1953 in Cape Town. She started her career as an artist at the university in the city studying visual art. Graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1976, she left her homeland of South Africa and emigrated to The Netherlands. During her studies she worked with collage, drawing, painting and occasionally with sculpture, and this early phase of her artistic development showed a strong focus on the human form, which would later prove to be Marlene Dumas’ most significant motif. A further emphasis was on the examination between black and white, where influences of the apartheid still noticeable in her home country were certainly recognisable, although the artist never explicitly made this dark era a subject of her art.
Tuition with Carel Visser, Jan Dibbets and Ger van Elk
Marlene Dumas intensified her art studies in The Netherlands; at the open art institute De Ateliers, then called ateliers ’63, she was taken under the wings of the sculptor Carel Visser and the conceptual artists Ger van Elk and Jan Dibbets. The influence of the Haarlem period was so strong that it forced a temporary break in Marlene Dumas’ work: Instead of her own figurative painting, the artist focused on an exploration of Informel and abstract art. This orientation did not last long however, and in the early 1980s, Dumas returned completely to figurative depiction, accepting reality only as a vague starting point for her alienations and transformations.
Marlene Dumas seeks beauty in horror
Marlene Dumas is particularly interested in the psychology of horror, and a course in this subject which she abandoned shortly before graduating has also found its way into her work. In order to depict this as expressively as possible, the range of abstract art is not enough. Instead, Dumas relies on figurative techniques in which she uses lifelike models, mostly photographs, which she has either created herself or taken from journals and magazines. The lifelike, detailed originals are deformed, alienated, distorted, and thus acquire a new, terrible depth that reminds the viewer of the awful, all-devouring abyss of which Friedrich Nietzsche so convincingly warned us in his epochal work Beyond Good and Evil. For Dumas, however, it is not about frightening the audience or even just a cheap, cozy scare, but about nothing less than reality itself – which for her is inextricably linked to the terrible – while she sees only a romantic transfiguration in the one-sidedness of beauty.
Lively exhibition activity; multiple awards
Marlene Dumas has received various types of prizes and awards including the 2011 Rolf Schock Prize and the 2017 Hans Theo Richter Prize. She was and is represented at numerous exhibitions such as the 7th and 9th documenta in Kassel, Biennales in Venice, Johannesburg, São Paolo and Sydney, and her works are much coveted by museums and private collectors.
Marlene Dumas - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
